What You Will and Won't See on Fear the Walking Dead

Fear the Walking Dead finally premieres on Sunday, and like any spin-off, it's contending with massive amounts of fan expectation. But how many of those expectations will actually be fulfilled? Here's everything you can expect- and can't expect- from the first season of Fear the Walking Dead:

From the initial reviews, Fear is already getting a reputation for being an extremely slow burn, maybe too slow for many fans of The Walking Dead's special brand of gory zombie action. And although it is by definition a slower burn than its parent show, since it's an apocalyptic show rather than a post-apocalyptic show, it still features walkers right off the bat. In the above video, AMC released the first three minutes of The Walking Dead, and those expecting to see early walkers will not be disappointed.

Difficult zombie kills

The Walking Dead does a fantastic job of demonstrating the decomposition of the walkers, especially since it becomes easier and easier to kill them each season. Last season, the characters managed to kill a horde of walkers using just a fire hose.

Don't expect that kind of cakewalk to happen on Fear though, as these walkers are barely different from human beings, and it's much harder to kill a person than it looks in the movies. Showrunner Dave Erickson teased that the characters will try and fail to stab the zombies' skulls in the spin-off, because their bodies are much hardier. "The point was it's hard physically to kill somebody," Erickson told THR.

Family Dysfunction

Multiple reviewers have described Fear as "Parenthood meets The Walking Dead," which might be just crazy enough to work. It shows the apocalypse from the perspective of a blended, dysfunctional family that is constantly threatening to break down completely, which becomes a parallel to a society on the brink of collapse.

"I think the benefit, because it's just the onset [of the outbreak], is that it did allow us to take the problems that this family would have had regardless of if there was a zombie around the corner, and play to that drama, which only gets exacerbated by what's happening," Erickson told Yahoo! TV.

Political unrest

Fear the Walking Dead examines exactly what would happen in urban LA if the world started falling apart, which inevitably involves politics. Communication begins to break down all over the world, which leads to social unrest, which leads to demonstrations, riots, and further chaos. Fear reportedly doesn't shy away from engaging with party politics, although it is careful not to take any particular side.

What you won't see

Characters from The Walking Dead

There have been rumors since its inception that certain characters from The Walking Dead would cross over to Fear the Walking Dead, particularly characters who have been killed off in the last six seasons but would still be alive in the prequel's timeline (anyone but Andrea or Lori, please). But unfortunately, there are no plans to directly cross over the two shows anytime soon.

"[The] idea of seeing an ancillary character who happened to be in Los Angeles and got out and landed in Georgia is interesting," said Erickson. "But I don't think we're going to do that. There's no plan to see any original characters."

The CDC

When Robert Kirkman first conceived of the show, he envisioned Noah Emmerich reprising his role as Dr. Edwin Jenner, who worked at the CDC trying to find a cure as the world fell apart. The notion of showing Jenner's wife, who also worked at the CDC died before the events of The Walking Dead, was thrown around as well, but Kirkman thought better of it, especially considering the mixed reception of the entire CDC plotline.

"We won't see the CDC," said Erickson. "When we have two narratives living under the same umbrella mythology, the instinct would be to bring those two stories together and to conflate them. From a creative standpoint, I think we have enough story that we'll be able to ride on for quite some time."

Big-picture attempts to stop the apocalypse

There will be political unrest, there will be (futile) attempts to combat the apocalypse, and there will be military, but the audience won't see it from any leaders' perspectives. Like the original series, Fear will explore the effects of the zombie apocalypse on everypeople, and anything more institutional will be seen solely from the central family's perspective.

"We never tell the story from the perspective of the CDC or the generals or the politicians. It's not going to be World War Z, but we will see a military presence. We will see the effort to stop the contagion, the effort to contain it. We'll do it consistently through our family's filter, but, yeah, absolutely. We wanted to present the outbreak in a way that felt credible… we refer to the authorities a number of times, and the expectation is that there's a solution and they will come in and they will fix it. We'll see them attempt to do that, and then, of course, we'll see them fail."

"Zombies," "geeks," or "walkers"

You'll never hear the term "zombies" on the show, nor will you hear any snarky references to Dawn of the Dead or Evil Dead, as no one in this universe has ever seen a zombie movie. You also won't hear the terms used on The Walking Dead, such as "walkers" or my personal favorite, "geeks," because it's a spin-off, and it's trying to differentiate itself.

"We don't call them walkers, we're coming up with as much cool West Coat verbage as we can," Erickson said.